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Throw the druid and in many cases the warlock on that pile of classes that are good at exploring.

The claim it's "got nothing to do with psionics except doing some psychic damage" is not a fact, it's at best an interpretation. When you have a spell list that contains such things as Message, Vicious Mockery, Dissonant Whispers, Command, Detect Emotions, and Calm Thoughts you are bordering on...

I'm playing one now. And you might be seeing a "wizard extinction event" at your table - but as of 2023 (the most recent year I have data for) the wizard was the fourth most popular class and the most popular spellcaster. It used to be joked for good reason that "It's called Wizards of the Coast...

That's because (a) the best caster-like psionic is the GOOlock because warlocks are just better thematically and mechanically than cookie cutter full casters, and the ability to Just Do Stuff through invocations is better than cookie cutter spell casting and (b) the College of Whispers bard is...

The problem is that for practical purposes what we have here is an Int-based sorcerer. And that WotC's internal playtesting process appears terrible (I recall the brawler fighter which I wanted to like but was not ready for public playtesting). If you can not mechanically substantially...

And we should learn from their silly mistakes and not end up where the musicians are with "modernism" being about a century out of date. Authorities typically regard musical modernism as a historical period or era extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the...

oD&D through B/X and 1e did have intentionality; Gygax was just very bad at explaining what he was trying to do and the saving throws are a good example of this. To explain them you started at the left and used the first appropriate one. Death, Paralysation, or Poison was the first category and...

I think you're overstating things. White Wolf didn't refer to the GM as "the storyteller" for no reason and there is a significant difference between a Trad GM and a referee running a West Marches game. Yes it opened further but there was never one way.

This is why I tend to refer not so much to "modern games" as "post-Forge games". The actual Forge games are barely remembered and a lot of what the Forge itself produced was fertilizer (and I mean that both ways) but good things did grow out of that design school.

Bastions are for a specific type of campaign and not one I'm running right now. And to be blunt they look about the quality of a random PF1e subsystem that was included for a specific module. No. I want additions to a ruleset that expand my table whether or not they are for me personally. My...

[snip for length] I think what you are missing here is that the core reason for the lack of genuinely interesting stuff in 5e is the glacial release schedule, which seriously contributed to 5e's longevity. If we look at 4e then we can roughly divide it into three eras. OG pre-Essentials, The...

This is where I split Forge games from modern post-Forge games. Forge games themselves, like My Life With Master, Polaris, Wushu Open, or Dogs in the Vineyard tended to be about this one specific thing. Modern post-Forge games have learned from that crucible but tend to be much broader. I mean...

Ahhh... The "what is a hit point?" argument. And given that hit points measure how beaten up you can get without getting injured or slowed. Plot armour in other words.

There are a few - but yes this is a big one. And I'd consider much more a trad thing tbh. Modern games very rarely have rules lawyers and what is rules lawyering but telling the GM how things work? It's 3.X where this was at its peak. I don't think as many modern games do this as you think...

Re read the first sentence. I'm not dismissing games like My Life With Master, Fate, or Unisystem as unimportant. I'm saying that that 2010 was when the ideas that people were working on with games like Polaris and Dogs in the Vineyard actually coalesced although most predate that.

I actually do consider there to have been an approximate time boundary when what I'd call modern RPG design coalesced from a collection of ideas that you can find some of in earlier RPGs to the design of actual games that were popular by RPG standards rather than basically belonged to a message...

And remember the Bo9S is the parts that did make the cut. The pick of the classes and recharge mechanics and not e.g. the multiple simultaneous condition tracks.